Fun With Twitter: Feedburner Mashup

Despite the sensation that Twitter has become, who needs to actually Twitter when you can have more fun being a Twitter Watcher? So if you want to see what other people are Twittering without having to login into Twitter, why not display an HTML badge of sorts on your blog? I know that Twitter has its own badge for your own Twittering, but I don’t really like their Flash badge. They have something called a JavaScript Badge, but as far as I can tell, you’re limited to viewing your own Twittering.

What if you want to view the Twitter public timeline? Well, you can use Feedburner‘s services and tools to create a nice, clean display of recent Twitterings. All you do is take the public timeline’s RSS feed and “burn” it in Feedburner. Then you use Feedburner’s BuzzBoost service (under the Publicize tab, first item at the top of the left column menu) to produce your HTML badge. You can choose the number of items to display (1-15, all), the display format (plain text, full HTML), the date of an item, etc.

Once you’ve configured your BuzzBoost for the Twitter public timeline feed, Feedburner will show you a snippet of Javascript/HTML code that you can insert into the sidebar of your website. If you want to apply some style to it, the BuzzBoost content has HTML attributes that can be controlled with simple CSS code. For the purposes of illustration, I’ve used an HTML table below (shock! horror! blasphemy!). If I have some time later, I’ll post some CSS.

There are a lot of other things you can do with BuzzBoost, but I’ve not been able to successfully use the output of any Yahoo Pipes. Until Yahoo offers a way to output clean RSS feed views of complex information, you have to massage custom feed mashups before you “badge” them in BuzzBoost.

Warning: content in Twitter public timeline below may have NSFW text. Click link to see content.

If you do not seeing anything other than the ugly table border, that’s because Twitter is overloaded again and Feedburner can’t pick up the feed.

Originally posted on March 30, 2007 @ 8:00 am